"P..p...pa…" The boy's breath stirred his dark hair away from his eyes as each repetition of the syllable grew more forceful with his frustration. Lisbet Hawke, quietly dusting the shelves in the library so she could listen in on the lesson (and trying to hide from Fenris' view the tiny spark of lightning magic she was using to attract the dust), held back a chuckle when her son glanced up at his father with a scowl that did as much to proclaim his parentage as did his green eyes. Fenris, unmoved by his son's glowering criticism, nudged him back toward the book. "Go on. You know the letters. Sound out the rest of the word."

Malcolm let out one more great huff before returning his attention to the puzzling word. "Pa...ra...this is a D...do...but Da, I do not know this last one."

Fenris smiled slightly. "Then clearly we must work more on the end of the alphabet. That is an X, Malcolm. You pronounce it as K and S, together."

"If it is K and S," protested the child, "why do we not just write K and S? Why do we need so many letters?"

Hawke did not entirely stifle her laugh at the boy's affronted air. Fenris arched an eyebrow in her direction before continuing. "If it were a K and an S, you could always take one of them away. An X is...always together. You cannot separate it into two." Malcolm's narrowed eyes suggested he did not approve of inseparable letters, so Fenris hastily added, "Besides, X is a Tevene letter originally. That means this word was borrowed from Tevene, so it retains its spelling."

This got Malcolm's attention, hungry as he always was to learn more of his father's storied past in foreign lands, all the more so given Fenris' reticence on the subject. Seeing the light of attempted digression in the boy's eyes, Fenris pointed to the next sentence. "Go on, then."

"But Da," said Malcolm, pointing back to the word with its stubborn X, "what does this word mean? 'Para...dox'? It's no use reading it if I don't know what it means!"

"True enough," Fenris nodded, eyes narrowed as he considered a definition. "A paradox is…"

"Is your Da," Hawke put in, glancing their way from the shelves. She smiled when her menfolk looked up at her with identically puzzled expressions, Malcolm's nose wrinkling just as Fenris' did.

"Explain, Hawke?" Fenris asked, while Malcolm looked at him as if pondering whether a paradox was a type of elf, or a warrior, or perhaps the reason why some children called their Da papa, or…

"Ah…" Hawke hesitated, blushing now under the weight of curious green eyes (two sets of them, Malcolm looking back to her now) and the memories that had prompted her to speak. "Never mind, honey. Maybe that isn't the best example for you. Your Da can explain it better than I can anyway."

Fenris kept that penetrating gaze on her a moment more before turning back to his son. "A paradox," he said, "is when two things that seem like they could not both be true at the same time, nevertheless are. And if you look closely enough, there will be a good reason for it, though at first glance it does not seem possible."

"Oh," said Malcolm, his voice small and uncertain. "So...like…"

"Some might say it is a paradox," Fenris said, one corner of his mouth twitching into a brief smile, "that I learned to trust your mother as I do, though she is a mage and even dares to use magic where a simple dustcloth would suffice, despite the many good reasons I had to distrust mages."

"Oh," Hawke laughed, shaking her dustcloth in his direction just to demonstrate that she was using one, even with the magic, "so I'm the paradox now?"

"If I am, Hawke, you certainly are."

Malcolm interrupted their flirting with the sort of dramatic sigh it took to get his parents' eyes off each other, and Fenris chuckled and returned to the book, coaxing his son through the next several sentences without any further such perplexing new words.

Some time later, when lessons were over and Malcolm had been sent out to play until supper, Fenris slipped silently up behind Hawke where she was reading on the library's couch and planted a kiss beneath her ear. She dropped her book with a squeal of delight as he leaned in toward her, elbows on the back of the couch. "I am still waiting," he said, "for an explanation. What did you mean when you called me a paradox?"

"Mm," Hawke mused, reaching a hand up to caress his cheek. "It's...something I've often thought of you, actually. Do you remember, Fenris, when you told me you didn't know how to read?"

His face darkened, eyes lowering as though weighed down by the memory of the shame he had felt in that admission. "I...had hoped you need never know that of me."

"But that's the thing. I never would have guessed it. Maker, I scarcely believed it when you told me! Of course it made sense that you would never have had the chance to learn, but no one who hears you talk could ever have thought you were illiterate, darling."

"And that is your paradox?"

"Just so. From your vocabulary alone I would have thought you'd been hiding from Danarius in a Circle Tower, somewhere, just working your way through every weighty tome in their library." She paused. "Actually, that would have probably worked. He would never have suspected you of hiding out with mages, after all."

"Hawke!"

"Besides, you know so much. About the world. About...obscure litle things I don't know how you ever learned, except that you have this knack for grasping any little bit of knowledge, given the smallest glimpse of it, and storing it up forever till it comes in handy. And let's not even mention how that applies to languages. I cannot fathom how you just absorbed the Qunari language from listening to them talk. And I am still a little sore that you've picked up more Orlesian in the few times we've been there than I ever managed to learn when Mother thought it was something her children ought to know."

"She never really spoke it herself, Hawke. You cannot blame her if her lessons were limited." He was smiling now, leaning in to rest his forehead against hers, and it took her a moment to pull her thoughts away from his lips and back to…

Hawke cleared her throat. "Anyway, you are a paradox, you see? Constantly surprising me by defying appearances. Broody with a sense of humor; brilliant even before you were literate. But you don't like to talk about those days, so I thought better of explaining myself in front of Malcolm."

His eyes closed a moment in thought, then he tipped his head to kiss her nose. "I suppose there is merit in that. But I stand by what I told him: you are no less a paradox to me, Hawke. The most paradoxical mage I have ever encountered."

"You're a paradox, I'm a paradox. No doubt," Hawke grinned, "that explains why we make such a fine pair!" Fenris reacted to the pun with a dramatic sigh (which was no doubt where Malcolm had learned the trick), resorting at last to a kiss to silence her self-amused giggling, and surely not to hide his own bemused smile.